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Recent news

NOV 11 2014

CIWare Makes Proactive BI Sociable

Forte Wares, a next-generation marketing analytics solution provider, has announced that CIWare, their proactive business intelligence solution which automatically discovers what is wrong in company performance and its root causes, is now also "talking" on enterprise collaboration platforms.

Image 1: Plain English email alert generated by CIWare

Forte Wares co-founder Berkin Ozmen describes CIWare as "an intelligent and hard-working data analyst, who crunches your data 24/7 and sends you its findings in plain English sentences through e-mail and joins the conversation on most of the popular enterprise collaboration platforms". Unlike traditional BI solutions, CIWare is designed to detect internal & external risk factors to business performance by itself via its proprietary algorithms. Digging through every available data source without manual intervention, risks and opportunities are uncovered before a major shift occurs leaving ample time to take action.

Image 2: Interactive CIWare portal for automated & ad-hoc analysis

With the new social features, CIWare is set on getting data to where people are and bringing down the user adoption barriers long suffered in the BI domain. What sets it apart from other BI solutions encouraging collaboration around data is, instead of building in-app social functions, CIWare delivers the information to the platform where communication is already going on. With CIWare, information is not only available right away but also in your face and cannot be missed. Currently integrated platforms include Yammer, Jive, SocialCast, MangoApps, Asana, Podio, Igloo, SocialText, Evernote, Box, DropBox as well as Zapier for additional apps.

Image 3: Yammer posting automatically generated by CIWare

CIWare is set in motion by establishing an alert for a critical performance indicator such as the overall sales revenue figures. Then, every day, week or month, CIWare checks whether the sales dropped over a certain threshold. If an alert is triggered, next, CIWare analyzes fluctuations in all related KPIs (such as revenue per customer, number of active customers and even marketing spend), as well as subsets (such as revenue from New York, revenue from Youth segment) and isolates the most important factors that have caused this drop. All these findings are translated into plain English sentences, so that when CIWare delivers its alerts, it reads as if some analyst looked at all this data and is now sharing his/her findings with you directly or on your sales department discussion board on Yammer. The email and post also include a link to the interactive portal which displays a complete view of causal relations. On the portal, it is possible to drill down even further through a business-user-friendly interface and reveal associations with operational issues, experience pain points and recorded customer sentiments (e.g. the link between customer sentiments on Twitter, product delivery delays and Youth segment revenue).

Berkin Ozmen explains that "however nice looking your dashboards and scorecards may be, they become a bore after a couple of months of use, and users stop looking at them. With CIWare, we are humanizing the whole process, making BI literally talk to business, and with this new feature, we are making it part of the corporate social network. Is this a substitute for traditional BI solutions? Definitely not, but we believe it is a vital complement for organizations looking for bridging the gap between data and decisions."

Forte Wares announced today that it will be collaborating with the BigDataVendors ecosystem in addressing the big data analytics needs of companies across the world.

www.BigDataVendors.com is a growing ecosystem of over 85+ Big Data product companies and specialized service firms who have a ‘packaged product/solution’ that solves a Big Data problem. The firm publishes only Big Data related information such as products, customer success stories and press releases and is media partner for major Big Data events and part of Big Data customer advisory boards around the world.

Forte Wares announced that it will be collaborating with BigDataVendors in both business development and joint event partnerships upcoming months. The company has also announced that it will be participating in other analytics communities such as KDNuggets (Analytics, Big Data, Data Mining, and Data Science Resources) for additional collaboration opportunities.

Forte Wares, the solutions division of Forte Consultancy Group, today announced its newest product, CIWare, a groundbreaking solution that will bring a fresh perspective to the BI domain, is to be introduced at the ABTEC Exhibition & Conference in Bahrain on the 8th of April, 2014.

The fifth of Forte Wares’ products to be launched, CIWare is a welcome addition to an already stellar bundle of BI solutions that aim to help companies ramp up their commercial practices.

CIWare, which is short for “Causal Intelligence Ware,” is a product that radically changes the way business reports are prepared and disseminated inside companies, not only breaking down user adoption barriers, but also making reporting more proactive and accessible than ever.

The product, once deployed, proactively via email provides specific critical actionable information to different individuals inside the company when certain pre-identified triggers are hit. With such an environment established, business decisions can be made immediately, without executives having to dig in through dozens of reports or dashboards, without it being too late.

Explaining CIWare, Berkin Ozmen, Forte Wares Managing Partner, stated “Imagine you are the Chief Marketing Officer of a company in the service sector. Now imagine you know around the clock you have a solution that will warn you via email almost real-time when, for example:

There is a more than 10% increase in the number of customers in the high-value customer segment closing their accounts

A certain branch, dealer, or store had a 20% or more decrease in earnings in the prior week

The sales of a certain product or service have decreased more than 30% in a given region

This is what CIWare is all about, giving the right information to the right people at the right time, cutting through the mounds of useless data to enable effective and rapid decision-making.”

Mr. Ozmen further added “CIWare also identifies root causes, making the decision-making and action-taking process all the simpler.” To illustrate his point, Mr. Ozmen gave an example: “If sales have dipped 5%, CIWare doesn’t just point this out, but rather, it gives deep and actionable information – that the 5% decrease in sales has been triggered mainly by:

A decrease in spending of 20% by the elderly segment primarily in two cities

Stock-out issues experienced in 10% of the stores in those two cities

Further triggered due to a 30% decrease in marketing spend over the time period

Mr. Ozmen touching on the capabilities as well as the design philosophy behind CIWare, stated, “We designed this solution to do essentially what a human Business Intelligence Analyst could do, capable of digging in to all available data to find the root causes triggering business problems or opportunities, and reporting findings to the people in the business that can take action on it.”

Commenting on the need for CIWare, Forte Consultancy Group’s General Manager Ali Pirinccioglu stated “the business reporting practices of most companies today are not effective; either too many reports are produced, reports that are usually very high level, not actionable, delivered too late, and end up being ignored over time, or are too basic, as a dedicated internal BI capability is required to provide deep and meaningful information. With this new solution, businesses will be spared valuable time and resources, and given the critical information they need at the right time to take action and ensure a positive impact is made to the bottom-line."

The company announced that it will be showcasing the solution during ABTEC 2014, the leading invitation-only event for the financial technology community in the Middle East & North Africa region, to be held on the 8th and 9th of April. Mr. Pirinccioglu stated “we believe that the launch of CIWare fits perfectly with ABTEC's vision of introducing game-changing technology to the most passionate and innovative IT leaders, which is why we also became a sponsor of the event. We cordially invite all delegates to our stand at C03, for a demonstration of how CIWare is set to change how analysis and reporting is done, forever.”

The solutions division of Forte Consultancy Group today announced release of a new plug-and-play solution for segmenting and predicting behavior of credit card customers for the financial service providers. With what the company calls a 'ReadyWare', credit card providers will gain a 360-degree view of their customers for more pro-active marketing activities in a matter of days.

Pro-actively retaining high value cardholders who have high attrition risk

Customizing offerings based on cardholder profile and lifestyle

Pro-actively stimulating spend and preferred behavior, such as

Cross-selling second or supplementary cards to single cardholders with high potential

Identifying and addressing customers with decreasing spend and those that are occasional users

Motivating cash withdrawal and installments for customers who are likely to increase their profitability through them

Motivating revolving behavior for customers with low risk to increase spend over time

Ali Pirinccioglu, General Manager of Forte Consultancy Group, explained the rationale behind the new solution as, "Our consultancy team has completed at least a dozen customer analytics projects for credit card providers across Europe and Asia, in just the last 2 years. In almost all cases our clients demanded solutions that can be implemented fast enough to react to changing market conditions but were also cost efficient enough to keep their short term profitability at bay. The collaboration between our consultancy and development teams helped us build such a solution, which can be deployed in a matter of days and provide answers to most common analytical CRM needs of credit card providers.". Berkin Ozmen, Forte Wares' Managing Partner added, "Our team's learnings from working with the leading credit card providers across our region have been extremely valuable for us. We were not only able to come up with the most sought after analyses and models, but had the chance to test our new solution against real world scenarios before releasing it into the market."

Forte expects the ReadyWare to be especially attractive for banks which currently have limited to no data mining software and models in place, as it would give an instant boost to CRM capabilities. Yet, Mr. Ozmen suggests that "Even companies in more advanced states can benefit from our ReadyWare, as it would provide them a quick and low-cost opportunity to challenge their existing models, which can be worth millions on its own."

The company announced that it will be also showcasing the solution during ABTEC 2014, the leading invitation-only event for the financial technology community in the Middle East & North Africa region, on 8-9 April - "We believe that this ReadyWare, as well as our other solutions fit perfectly with ABTEC's vision of introducing game-changing technology to the most passionate and innovative IT leaders, which is why we also became a sponsor of the event.”

Forte Wares Managing Partner also hints that their current product portfolio is just the beginning and the company is set to become an innovation power house for the BI domain with new products in 2014: “We cordially invite all delegates to our stand at C03, for a demonstration of how our solutions can boost their analytics capabilities, as well as witnessing the launch of our next BI solution – named CIWare, which will change how analysis and reporting is done, forever.”

Forte Consultancy Group Announces the Launch of its BI Solutions Division

Forte Consultancy Group, the preeminent provider of analytics-driven consultancy, outsourcing, and solutions in the EMEA region, today announced the release of four new analytics products under its new division Forte Wares. These new products, some of which are the first of their kind, will provide end-to-end data warehousing (QWWare), data mining (QIWare), geographical intelligence (GIWare), and reporting capabilities (XIWare) to companies across a variety of industries.

In addition to the launch of its first four products, launching immediately as well will be ReadyWares, a solution designed to be built on top of the new products. With ReadyWares, companies will be able to address issues unique to their industries (including telecommunications, finance, retail, and more), with plug-and-play models as well as reports providing advanced segment management, customer retention, and sales growth capabilities, among other benefits.

"We have had the pleasure of working with clients on over a hundred BI-related projects across a number of industries around the world over the past decade,” said Forte Consultancy Group General Manager Ali Pirinccioglu, in explaining the story behind the launch of Forte Wares. “Unfortunately, in many of the engagements we have seen the shortcomings of existing BI solutions in the market; most are not user-friendly, are not industry-specific, and are not budget-friendly,” he added. “Our decision to create a software solutions division was born out of necessity, to ensure we can enable our clients to tap into the value lying in data without having to pay an arm and a leg for a traditional costly solution that doesn’t generate ROI on its own," said Mr. Pirinccioglu. Explaining the role of the new division in the group company, Mr. Pirinccioglu stated, “With the addition of Forte Wares to our existing Forte Consultancy and Forte Experts brands, we are now able to essentially provide end-to-end service for companies looking to optimize their consumer-related marketing and sales practices, all via one-stop shopping under the Forte Consultancy Group umbrella of companies.”

The new company plans to upset the business intelligence market by introducing innovations to an aging domain. "Today, most solutions in the market are essentially replicas of each other, with no vendor asking what it can do better to help businesses, striving to innovate vs. its competitors", said Mr. Berkin Ozmen, Forte Wares’ Managing Partner, adding, “this holds true for even more recent domains – take Social Network Analysis in telecommunications as a case in point – it’s been around for years now, but vendors are still talking about the same capabilities and concepts. We launched Social Ripple Analysis to shake things up in that domain, and it immediately gained traction. This is what Forte Wares is about, and will stand for – innovations that are affordable, and usable.”

Explaining the product development mindset behind the new company, Mr. Ozmen said, "As Forte Wares, we are dedicated to follow certain principles when deciding on whether or not to pursue the development of a new product - it has to either bring in a non-existent solution to address an existing business problem, cut costs and decrease resource requirements significantly, or make an existing solution more relevant and usable by the business,” adding, “we are not your traditional BI solutions provider. These players have started as software companies first, and have entered into the consultancy market to create domains for selling their software. We are doing the exact opposite. After years of operating in the management consulting domain, we have entered into the software domain, to make sure our clients have access to efficient and effective tools to help them solve critical business problems they face.”

In regards to the approach around the product development cycle, Mr. Engin Arici, Solutions Development Manager explained, “When we start designing new solutions, we talk with our management consultants and ask them about what issues their clients face with their BI solutions. This allows us to get valuable insights which we use when developing our products - for example, our auto-mart feature in QIWare cuts down data mart preparation time, which is a key client issue, by up to 80%.” Mr. Arici added in regards to the importance of innovation for Forte Wares, “Over 50% of our budget is allocated to researching and developing new algorithms, to make sure that we can continuously bring in innovative disruption to our clients through analytics. This research is also supported by our management consultancy team, who continuously develop new and more effective methodologies to serve our clients, producing vast IP during the process.”

Forte Wares has been launched as a highly multinational entity, with developers from China, Poland, and Turkey, creative team members from the USA, Ukraine, and India driving the company forward. Innovative workplace techniques are being utilized in the company, with cloud collaboration and partial home office model in place. Mr. Ozmen said in regards to this multinational cloud approach, “We have access to thousands of high-quality professionals via cloud, and if needed, can onboard a developer with niche skills living halfway across the world within 24 hours, without disrupting his or her lifestyle,” adding, “we are 24/7 looking for individuals who can bring in the best set of left and right brain thinking to our company and believe this management approach allows us to find them.”

Forte Consultancy Group, the preeminent provider of analytics-driven marketing and sales consultancy services and solutions in the EMEA region, today announced the completion of its Marketing Analytics Academy.

The Academy, which ran for a period of eight weeks, was a first of its kind in Turkey. Initially conceptualized by Forte Consultancy Group’s Analytics Division Partner Berkin Ozmen, the program was designed to develop the best and brightest graduates from select universities in Turkey around gaining core business analytics skills. “We realized that the academic curriculum in universities across Turkey was not sufficient in or effective at preparing students to enter the world of consulting, in particular around data mining and analytics. So we decided to take things into our own hands.”

The first step was to determine the objectives of the Academy. “We wanted to set up something which would allow us to take fresh college graduates and equip them with the necessary tools so they could hit the ground running,” said Mr. Ozmen. The content was then prepared, with the Academy set to run over the course of eight weeks. The key training areas were around marketing analytics concepts and tactics (with a particular focus on the telecommunications sector), corporate acquisition, sales, and retention practices, data mining tools, data preparation, and ultimately, analytics modeling.

The next step was to find the right attendees. “We recruited from six or seven of the country’s best universities, with significant time and effort put into attending career fairs and promoting the Academy,” said Forte Consultancy Group’s Director of Human Resources. We received over 300 applications and ended up choosing the nine best candidates for the program.”
Through a variety of classroom and hands-on trainings, case tasks, and individual as well as group assignments, the nine attendees have now successfully completed the Academy (several of which will be joining Forte Consultancy Group on a full-time basis). “Though an extensive and exhaustive effort, we believe it was well worth the effort. Each and every one of the attendees has exceeded my expectations by fully embracing what we tried to teach them,” said Mr. Ozmen, and added “they are ready, in my opinion, to tackle analytics-related consulting assignments.”

The overwhelming success of the program has already prompted the company to prepare for next years' version. “We definitely will be doing this again,” said Mr. Ozmen, adding “we may mix things up a bit next time by changing the timing and content of the program, but for sure there will be more Marketing Analytics Academies.”